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ADDRESS 



WILLIAM WOOD, LL.D., 



HIS ELECTION FOR THE FOURTH TIME TO THE 
CHAIRMANSHIP 



BOARD OF TRUSTEES 



College of the City of New York, 



January 21st, 1879. 



leto Borh : 



WYNKOOl' & HALLEM3ECK, PRINTERS, 
No. 121 Fulton Street. 




1879. 



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ADDRESS 



WILLIAM WOOD, LL.D 



HIS ELECTION FOR THE FOURTH TIME TO THE 
CHAIRMANSHIP 



BOARD OF TRUSTEES 

OF THE 

College of the City of New York, 

January 21st, 1879. 



Heto ^orh : 



WYXKOOP & HALLENBECK, PRINTERS. 
No. 121 Fulton Street. 

1879- 



:^BW YORK PDBt*. tIB?L, 



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ADDRESS 



Gentlemen — Accept my grateful thanks for the honor you 
have just conferred upon me in electing me, for the fourth time, 
Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the College of the City of 
IS'ew York. 

Gentlemen — The year 18Y8 was a busy and anxious one for 
the Trustees of our College. They held eleven public meetings, 
and the Executive Committee for the "care, government, and 
management of the College " ^loidi fourteen protracted meetings, 
and delegated to nine different Sub-Committees, to be deliberated 
and reported upon, some of the most important work ever 
brought before the Executive Department of the College. 

On the 10th of July a new department was added to the 
course of instruction in the College, and Russell Sturgis, Esq., 
was elected by the Board of Trustees Professor of Architecture 
and the Arts of Design. He entered upon his duties as such 
last October. 

On the 30th of December, the resignations of George W. 
Huntsman, Esq., Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, 
and of the Rev. Jesse A. Spencer, S. T. D., Professor of the 
Greek Language and Literature, were presented to and accepted 
by the Board of Trustees. 

The past year was made remarkable in our annals by an unsuc- 



cessful attempt on the part of some of our Legislators at Albany 
to abolish the College of the City of ]^ew York. This attempt 
was signally defeated by the indignant remonstrances of 54,330 
citizens of New York, presented to the Legislature by Speaker 
Husted, last February, and regarding which a newspaper of the 
day remarked, " The petitions for a modification of the Excise 
" Law were thrown entirely into the shade by three monstrous 
" packages presented by Speaker Husted, and said to contain the 
" names of 54,330 citizens of tlie City of IN'ew York, remons- 
" trating against the abolishment of the Free College of the City. 
" Their presentation from the Speaker's desk was received by a 
" general laugh from all parts of the House." These 54,330 sig- 
natures were verified by affidavit of the Secretary of the President 
of the College, and, subsequently to their dispatch to Albany, 
some thousands more signatures were received, against any in- 
terference by the Legislature with the College. 

From this it would appear, that the tax-payers of this city 
are at direct issue with our worthy Governor, who has again 
just blown his annual blast against secondary or higher educa- 
tion at the expense of the State. His arguments against it, and 
in favor of restricting State education to the three " R's," have 
a curious resemblance to those which I used to hear from the 
English Tories forty years ago, against admitting the '"' common 
" people " to the benefit of instruction even with respect to the 
three " R's." Of course there is room for honest difference of 
opinion regarding this most important matter ; but the opinion 
of the citizens of !N"ew York, the second largest English-speaking 
city in the world, and the de facto metropolis of our Republic, 
seems to be quite unmistakable. 



Such being the case, gentlemen, it seems to be our duty, as 
Trustees of the College, to render it every way worthy of the 
high estimation in which it is held by such a vast multitude of 
our fellow-citizens ; and as you are aware, much thought and much 
painful anxiety have been bestowed upon that matter during the 
last three months especially, and our thanks are eminently due to 
the three gentlemen of the sub-committee appointed to inquire 
respecting the want of efficiency as to the enforcement of dis- 
cipline in the departments under the control of certain Profes- 
sors. 

The result of that inquiry was, that " the best interests of 
" the College imperatively demand reforms in the three depart- 
" ments referred to." When such a report has been made and 
adopted by the Trustees of the College, it seems to me that the 
reforms indicated should be made with the least possible delay, 
and that when Professors have tendered their resignations, and 
these have been accepted, it is for the highest interest of the Col- 
lege that no time should be lost in filling the vacant Chairs, and 
that an important factor in the qualifications of the new 
appointees ouglit to be their power to begin their official duties 
promptly. I perhaps ought to remark here that the disorders 
which have been animadverted upon during the last six weeks by 
some of the Trustees have been for years confined to a few 
rooms, presided over by gentlemen who had failed to secure the 
attention of their students. In point of fact, the discipline main- 
tained in general is so rigid, and yet kept up with so much ease 
by the large majority of the instructors, that perfect order and 
quiet have been at all times secured in every part of the College 
Buildings, except in the few rooms to which I have referred. 



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While the Professorships of Pure Mathematics, Moral Philoso- 
phy, and Greek Language and Literature are all of very high 
importance, with regard to the result of a College course, in my 
opinion the last two are of prime importance, and I hope that in 
selecting the Professor of Moral Philosophy, care will be 
taken to see that he holds correct views upon Political Econ- 
omy — upon the intercourse between nations — upon the free- 
dom of exchange — and upon the right of every citizen to 
sell in the dearest and buy in the cheapest markets of the world. 
And not less care should be taken in the selection of a 
Professor of the Greek Language and Literature. While it is 
well that he should be thoroughly conversant with what may 
be called the technicalities of the language and know all that 
can be known about the use of the ^olic digamma and the 
Greek particles, yet he should be possessed of something far 
beyond and more important than this. He should be able to 
imbue his students with a real love of the literature, philosophy, 
the arts and sciences, the modes and habits of life of that 
remarkable people — those Frenchmen of that earher civilization, 
whose language and literature, after the sack of Constantinople 
in 1453, broke up the thick darkness which had brooded over 
middle and northwestern Europe for nine hundred years. 

When our own British ancestors were sunk in the lowest 
depths of savagery, George Finlay, the latest Historian of Greece, 
whose work, in time to come, promises to bear to Grecian 
History the same relation that Gibbon's Decline and Fall has 
to th^it of Pome, says, " The habits of Athenian society were soft 
" and humane ; the wealthy Kved in palaces and purchased 
^' libraries ; many philosophers like Proclus enjoyed ample 



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" revenues, and like him received rich legacies. Ladies wore 
" dresses of silk, embroidered with gold. Both sexes de- 
" lighted in boots of thick silk ornamented with tassels 
" of gold fringe. The luxurious drank wine of Rhodes, 
" Cnidos, or Thrasos, as we find attested by the inscribed 
" amphorae, still scattered in the fields around the modem 
'' city. At last, in the year 529, Justinian confiscated 
'' all the funds devoted to philosophic instruction in Athens, 
" closed the schools, and seized the endowments of the 
" Academy of Plato, which had maintained an uninterrupted 
" succession of teachers for nine hundred years." Justinian, that 
great legal luminary, probably thought that the three " R's " were 
enough for a conquered and enslaved people. 

The habits of the Greeks at Constantinople became thoroughly 
corrupt, and their chariot races and mimic naval battles, of which 
our own four-in-hand coach and yacht clubs are the modern 
equivalents, indicated no healthy physical training of the G-recian 
youth, as did that training of the Eepublics of Lacedemon and 
Attica. 

What were the causes of the decline and fall of the Grecian 
Republics, and of the great Roman Republic, whose citizens 
perhaps resembled somewhat the English-speaking races of the 
present day, if the Greeks resembled the French ? What causes 
led to the common ruin of the republican form of govern- 
ment in both these ancient civilizations ? It seems to me luxury 
and extravagant living, leading to corruption in the entire 'body 
politic. Might not our Professors of Greek and Latin di-aw 
pregnant lessons from the fate of these ancient republics, and 
Gideavor to repress in our own youth that tendency to luxury 



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and extravagance which is undoubtedly exercising a baneful 
influence upon them, and leading them away from the " sim- 
" plicity and godly sincerity " of the fathers and founders of our 
own repubhc ? 

Our notions of the Eoman rulers of the world are apt to be too 
heroic and grandiose, mainly owing to the manner in which they 
have been described by Poets and Dramatists, and, in this respect, 
the French have departed further from nature than the English 
writers. John Morley, in his lately published life of Yoltaire, 
remarks : " It is often said that Voltaire's Bomans are mere 
" creatures of parade and declamation, like the figures in David's 
"paintings, and it is very likely that the theatre infected the 
" French people with that mischievous idea of the Romans as a 
" nation of declaimers about freedom, and the death of tyrants. 
" The true Eoman was, no doubt, very much more like one of our 
" narrow, hard, and able Scotsmen in India, than the lofty talker 
" that delighted the parterres of Paris and Yersailles." 

I have dwelt somewhat at length, and perhaps somewhat irrel- 
evantly, upon the Grreeks and Pomans, not only because, accord- 
ing to Dr. Weisse's recent work on the " origin, progress, and 
" destiny of the English Language and Literature," 68 per cent, 
of the language used by our best writers, from Shakspere to 
Tennyson, is derived from G-reco-Latin roots, but because I have 
formed the opinion from practical experience that the best educa- 
tion for a young man, about to embark in mercantile life, is a 
thoroughly good classical education, followed up by the study of 
the English language, literature, and history, with, of course, some 
knowledge of the exact sciences, but the classical part of such a 
young man's training I consider of much more importance than 



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the scientific part. The best History of Greece, prior to Finlay's, 
was that of George Grote, born and bred a banker ; and in our 
own city, tliat successful merchant prince, the late A. T. Stewart, 
kept up his classical studies to the day of his death. 

Gentlemen, in conclusion, let me suggest for your considera- 
tion, whether it would not be well to jDrovide a building within 
tlie College grounds, fitted up with a certain number of small 
laboratories, where our students would have an opportunity of 
putting into practice the theory of the science which they have 
been taught by our eminent Professor of Chemistry. And I 
would again call the attention of the Trustees to the necessity of 
adding to the curriculum of the College a Lectureship on Prin- 
ciples and Methods of Teaching, or Pedagogy. Good male 
teachers for our common schools are scarce and difficult to be 
got, so that while the by-laws of the Board of Education require 
an experience of one year as a teacher in the common schools of 
the City of ]N"ew York before a Female Junior Teacher can be 
advanced to the salary and jDosition of an assistant teacher, the 
same by-law admits a Junior Male Teacher to the position and 
salary of an assistant teacher, after an experience as a teacher 
anywhere, in any school ; so few are the male teachers in this city 
of our own raising. 



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